Hi everyone.
One or two of you know that I've started a blog. www.bestparenticanbe.com. I'm pretty new here myself so I just wanted to say hi once again to everyone. I'm a father of a two year old son who is showing all the signs of autism. Ironically, I went through a period of feeling totally overwhelmed at the thought of having to figure out just what to do to help my son. It all started when my son was recently due for his 2 year health check. During the process of filling out the questionnaire it became really clear what the issue was. Since then, both me and my wife's heads have been in a spin and we've become somewhat dismayed at how long we have to wait before our son can get a diagnosis. We have to wait 22 months! That's almost another 2 years and our son is just two. That means he's going to have to wait as long as he's been alive to get diagnosed. Our healthcare visitor has been so helpful in guiding us but admittedly, it feels like a storm out there. So many authorities, so many acronyms, so many things to check. I was paralysed at the thought for almost a month until I realised the only way for me to get through this is by brute force and to document my findings. Only by documenting them would I be able to piece together all the pieces of the puzzle: how do I find an approrpriate school for my son? Can he get free therapy lessons? What type of therapy does my son even need? What about the local council - what can they do to help? How do I learn why my child keeps flapping his hand? Just too much to learn.
I've probably never been this transparent before but I realised this is a cause worth being transparent for. So I started my blog and have started to document my journey into one article. A repository explaining everything I've learnt so far. It's intended to help other parents who are just starting their journey and are also feeling overwhelmed. The link is here:
My plan is to post progress on this one post every week. I will be making calls to the local authority. I will be calling up the National Autistic Society (I did this recently and it took me 1 whole hour to get through to them. An incredibly long wait. So it might help others if I summarise what I learnt over the call). I know I'll have a lot of gaps in my knowledge at the moment but I hope over time it will fill up and be a comprehensive guide to anyone else feeling overwhelmed.
To the parents who are already well into their journey - I humbly request your advice. Please help me improve it. Please help me fill my knowledge gaps. If it's ok with you I will keep building that post with the knowledge that builds up.
Let me know what you think!
